How to tell if a single day of weather is an anomaly or due to climate change?

Question

I am interested in understanding how to tell if a single day of 'abnormal' weather is due to climate change or not. From my understanding, you would compare this day's weather to historical weather. However, is a day-to-day comparison accurate? Or would you have to take a large sample, like week, month, or season? It seems to me like it would be hard to compare one day to another historical weather average, because the day could just be an outlier not due to climate change... In other words, how do you tell if a seasonal storm or really hot summer day is due to climate change?

Answer 1

You generally cannot compare a single event to decide if it's unusual or not. And it's just as you said: there's no way to tell if it's just an outlier or if it's part of a pattern.

You can do things like say compare the number of extremely hot days in one summer and compare it to the number of hot days in previous years, but that would be based on multiple days and not a single event.